04/17/14 – Ray McGovern – The Scott Horton Show

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Alright you guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
And our next guest up today is Ray McGovern.
For 27 years he was an analyst at CIA.
He ended up being Vice President George H.W. Bush's CIA advisor, morning briefer, in the 1980s.
And he is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
And he writes often at Consortium News and at his own website, which I have somewhere in the pile here.
And here it is.
It's raymcgovern.com.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
Thank you, Scott.
I'm doing really well.
It's been an interesting week in the Ukraine.
Yeah, so tell us all about it.
Go ahead.
Well, you know, when I heard that the head of the CIA, John Brennan, had made a secret visit to Kiev, I knew that, you know, that the folly would continue with respect to U.S. policy.
Now, it was revealed by the White House that that report was correct.
But, of course, no one has explained what John Brennan was doing.
And the Russians have asked for an explanation.
But here I can give it to you now, because we saw what happened, what the Ukrainian government that we installed proceeded to do after he left.
Now, they wanted to make sure that they asserted their control over the Russian-leaning parts of Ukraine, namely eastern Ukraine, because the Geneva talks were coming up on Thursday.
They wanted to show that the Ukrainian army and so forth, security service, were in control.
And so, no doubt, at Brennan's behest, they decided to launch their army against, I don't know, against exactly whom, and neither did they, against their own people, really, in eastern Ukraine.
Now, many of the soldiers that have since been captured or have defected have admitted that they didn't really know what their mission was.
In any case, they were sent there, okay?
And what happens?
Many of some of the elite forces, I won't say many, a whole company of an airborne brigade, defects with its weapons and its armored personnel carriers, which are perfect for urban fighting, which have these 30-caliber bullets, pierce armor, and even an anti-tank weapon on them.
So six of those end up in the hands of folks in one of these cities in the east.
And many of the others, of the Ukrainian soldiers, are surrounded by local inhabitants, offered bread and water, which they gratefully accepted.
The whole thing was a fiasco.
There was not a shot fired until much later.
Let me clarify one point there, Ray.
When you say they defected, they defected from the Ukrainian state, but to who?
Just the streets?
To, yeah.
That's just to the people that they were supposed to suppress.
And since you weren't real clear on that, it was the people who were occupying the government buildings in places like Donetsk and, let's see, Slovyanka, and others, where these incidents took place.
I actually read it through a BuzzFeed where they talked about how these armored personnel carriers, in one instance, I'm not sure if it's the same thing you're talking about, but where they were surrounded by just hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people saying, no, you're not going to roll down this street, we're just blocking you.
And the soldiers were on their radios reporting back saying, hey, listen, you know, we can't do anything about it, and we're sure as hell not going to shoot these people, and so we're checkmated, what do you want us to do?
And, in fact, he's arguing with home base.
You don't see what I see.
I'm not following your orders.
Sorry.
That's right.
Yeah.
Request further instruction.
Request different instructions.
See, they were, thankfully, they were ordered not to shoot unless shot upon.
And what the Ukrainian interim government was counting on was some of these crazies from the neo-Nazi folks, from the folks that had been taking on people, that somebody would take a pot shot at some Ukrainian soldiers, and then they'd be off and running.
That didn't happen.
Now, there's one incident where you're talking about about 300, or maybe it was 600, I forget now, Ukrainian soldiers.
They're surrounded, and so 13 of their vehicles are taken from them, their weapons and their bullets are taken from them, and they're bussed back to their local base, their local Ukrainian armed forces base.
So everyone knew that the Ukrainian armed forces weren't really worth much.
Now we know that when they're sent against their own people, they're worth less than zero.
In any case, Scott, what we have here is a situation where a show of force was intended and urged on, no doubt, by John Brennan, and turned out to be not only not a show of force, but a fiasco indicating that the Ukrainian government is not capable of restoring order within its own borders.
And so what happens?
Well, Kerry and the president get up and say, we're going to do more sanctions.
There will be, as the president says, consequences.
There'll be consequences because we're sure that the Russians are stirring up these people, that there are Russian troops in there, there are Russian provocateurs, okay?
And guess what?
Before the night is over, the head of the EU, the head of the European Union's intelligence directorate, he's a Finnish common bar.
He's won all kinds of plaudits and awards, not only in Finland, but from the EU.
He speaks out and he says, we have no evidence that there are Russian troops in that part of the Ukraine.
We have no evidence that they are inciting people to do the kinds of takeovers that they have done.
What we do have evidence of is extreme dissatisfaction on the part of the local Ukrainian inhabitants there, and that's why they took over the government offices.
So within six hours, we have the head of the EU intelligence directorate explicitly contradicting the president and Kerry, who keep trying to blame this all on the Russians.
Now, Putin, this is kind of interesting.
Putin, of course, knew that Geneva was coming up, and so he gave, earlier in the morning, what he called a town hall.
Now, for those who are interested, you really ought to read pieces of that.
It's nothing like town halls in our country.
It's incredibly relaxed and incredibly non-scripted in a relative sense, although the appropriate and the expected questions are asked.
So he's asked all these questions, and he says, no, we don't, we're not involved in Ukraine with respect to these protests and demonstrations.
We do resolve, we do reserve the right to intervene if Russian citizens or Russian-speaking citizens are picked out and suppressed.
We haven't done that yet.
I have the authority to do that, but we're not there yet.
Yes, we have reinforced our troops in Crimea.
Now, how does that translate into headlines in the U.S.?
Putin admits that he sent armed forces into Crimea.
They don't draw the distinction between before Crimea was rejoined to Russia and after.
After it's rejoined to Russia, there's no objection to sending Russian forces in there.
Before then, I happen to believe Putin.
He didn't need to send forces in there.
He was allowed 25,000 forces under the agreement with Ukraine and the base there, the Sevastopol Naval Base and the Sevastopol Air Bases there.
So what we have here is, again, an incredible propaganda blitz by the West.
We're seeing now that even Obama is throwing doubts on whether this four-partite agreement can succeed.
But the bottom line for me is that after an ignominious expedition against the eastern Ukrainian people who are dissatisfied with Kiev and what happened in the Putsch of 22 February, on Brennan's recommendation, they decided to launch a military expedition out that way.
And what did they call it?
Well, they didn't know exactly what to call it.
So guess what, Scott?
They called it an anti-terrorist offensive.
So they're going to get all these people and they're going to call them terrorists.
Now, Putin in his power hall today said, you know, that was a criminal expedition.
You don't send your own forces against people, you know, to suppress them, your own forces.
We don't do that.
So bottom line, it looks like we have a denkpause, what the Germans call a pause to think.
And indeed, it will be pretty fragile here unless, unless what Putin calls these nationalists, these anti-Semites, these neo-Nazis put in their place and that everybody sees, including our own neocons.
Everyone sees incentive to tamp down this thing and not to let it get out of hand, which for the first time two days ago, I thought might happen.
But maybe it might get out of hand.
So this is good news on balance.
But of course, the devil will be in the details.
And whether the Ukrainian faux government that we installed will be allowed to implement the things it agreed to, or whether the Victoria Nuland and the other primadonna neocons are able to exert influence on Kerry again and put the kibosh on the agreement just reached.
Bumper music's playing and we got to go out and take this break.
But anyway, we'll be right back with Ray McGovern and find out more about American intervention in Ukraine in just one second.
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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm on the line with Ray McGovern here, former CIA analyst, now a veteran intelligence professional for Sanity, and we're talking about the mess over there in Ukraine.
And so now I'll go ahead and tell you, Ray, that other than the fact that it's been denied, I can also add that my wife is from Ukraine and reads Russian and also is an investigative reporter, and she took one look at this document, supposedly as reported by John Kerry and as reported by USA Today and every war party propagandist who doesn't care what's true today.
This supposed order telling Jews that they have to report and pay a tax and sign up as local Jews or whatever down at the bureaucracy office is an obvious hoax.
It's so completely ridiculously over the top it couldn't possibly be true.
And then, of course, it turns out there is no office, there is no tax, there is no anything behind this.
It's apparently one guy passed out five flyers to some Jews coming out of a synagogue, and then, okay, so that got reported as a fact, but then it got blown up from there, like, well, obviously this is the policy of the new junta seizing power in eastern Ukraine.
You know, Scott, I should sort of dust that off, but I can't, because anti-Semitism is evil, you know?
I know people who, well, Mike German, he doesn't make any secret of it anymore.
He's now working for the ACLU, but he worked for the FBI as a deep cover infiltrator of hate groups, okay?
And he's told me, Scott, what anti-Semitic hate groups are like, okay?
And so, when I'm accused, when I speak frankly about Israel's policy of being an anti-Semite, when I see this frivolous charge planted so that John Kerry can get up and play to his Jewish audience and also, you know, a juice of provocation that never existed, I get really angry.
And when you're Irish, that doesn't really help.
So, I thought this was pretty starless.
It was, for me, a token of how desperate John Kerry is, since he has screwed up royally for the nth time.
I mean, who's going to take John Kerry seriously?
Putin and Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, they know, and so does Obama.
But Kerry lied to his teeth 35 times in one speech on the 30th of August, when he claimed, we know, we know, Bashar al-Assad was responsible for the chemical attacks near Damascus.
We know, we know, we know, we know, we know.
Well, you don't have to go back to Shakespeare, you don't need to think he protests too much.
It's crystal clear he didn't know, and in retrospect, it's crystal clear he didn't know.
And in my view, the case has been proven that it wasn't Bashar al-Assad.
It was the rebels, because they had sarin gas.
And Cy Hirsch, as you know, and I hope your listeners know, has pretty much underscored the end result there.
Kerry wanted us to go to war with Syria.
He said it would be, quote, an unbelievably small war, end quote.
Now, put yourself in Putin's position, and put yourself in Lavrov's position.
Are they going to take this joker seriously?
No, man, if I'm Putin, I'm laughing my ass off at these clowns, I'm sorry.
This has got to be a riot for him.
He said he has a little theater built where he watches the American news at night, eats popcorn, it's a riot.
Yeah, I'm waiting for him to put on one of those pastel pink ties like Kerry and imitate him.
But in a more serious vein, you know, what we have here is, thankfully, a personal relationship of trust between Obama and Putin.
How do I know that?
Well, I watched what happened when Putin bailed out Obama, pulled his chestnuts out of the fire on Syria by getting the Syrians to agree to destroy their chemical weapons.
That's big, okay?
I also get it out of Putin's op-ed in the New York Times right about this time, when he said, we have a modicum of respect here.
I don't want to derail that, okay?
Now, who's been trying to derail that?
Well, the John Kerry's and the Victoria Nuland's of this world.
But very significantly, in Putin's press conference of, I think it was for March, he made explicit when somebody said, well, what do you think about Kerry making all these claims?
He said, well, this is what Putin said.
It's a virtual quote.
Mr. Kerry is an important figure in the U.S. political scene, but he doesn't make the decisions on foreign policy.
And I think we can all thank God for that.
Yeah.
All right, now, so when they hold these elections, it seems like it's all important how largely they draw the districts, right?
If it's one big nationwide election, then the momentum may well be with what seems like the unnatural conclusion, right?
The majority choosing a strong central government, united Ukraine at all costs, whereas if they hold the election in smaller districts, then what you'll have is certain districts outright choosing either secession or certainly strong federalism, decentralized, in the real meaning of the term federalism, decentralized system there.
And so I wonder, do you know if they've decided how exactly they're doing that?
I saw YATS, America's best friend YATS, that Nuland talked about and made the prime minister saying, yes, we've got to have this referendum, and I'm recommending that we adopt this federalist thing.
It seemed like a pretty good position.
It seemed like a pretty good concession to Russia.
But then again, it's all talk if what he's really calling for is just one big nationwide election that his side is much more likely, if not sure, to win.
Am I right?
Something around there?
Yeah.
You're right, Scott.
As far as I can see, the four-power or the four-quadripartite agreement today included a provision where regional autonomy would be part of the final deal.
Now, how much regional autonomy or how that all works out with respect to the referendums and the election itself really remains a matter to be dealt with now.
The reality, as I see it, is Putin has the high cards here.
He's not going to settle for tricks anymore.
He keeps talking about being tricked, and he's not going to be tricked again.
So I believe that he and the Ukrainians and Catherine Ashton and maybe Terry pull along on this will figure out a way to give the kind of regional autonomy that ideally, in my view, would end up in a confederation which would be neutral, which would be pledged not to join NATO, which would be very much like Finland.
The example sort of strikes out.
It screams out for looking at.
Finland is not going to do anything untoward toward Russia, and yet it prospers.
It's one of the most prosperous countries in the world.
How is that?
Because it can develop its own industries and its own economy, and it does so with very industrious people.
The same could happen to the Ukraine as long as they do not pose a strategic threat to Russia, and the only way they propose that is if the neocons and Kerry and the other people who see advantage in trying to draw them into NATO and into the EU knock it off.
One saving grace here is that the Ukrainians, even the ones in the West, are beginning to realize that this is not such a good deal for them.
The austerity measures that Yatsenyuk initially said would be a political suicide for him are going to be a political suicide for these quasi-new leaders that are in Kiev because they require real austerity on the part of the Ukrainians.
The Ukrainian manufacturing sector now, because of devaluation of their currency, are having trouble paying for the Russian goods that they get and vice versa.
So economic hardship is going to hit home as it did in Greece.
I was in Greece four summers ago, and I saw the general strikes.
I saw how the workers rose up and really tried to do what they could against the austerity measures and couldn't do much.
The Ukrainians are likely to do that in spades.
So that's another aspect here.
As it dawns on the Ukrainians that they're going to have to pay twice what they used to pay for natural gas to heat and so forth, then there's going to be a realization that, well, even in the Western Ukraine, this isn't such a good idea.
And again, you don't get that from the Western press, Scott.
What you get from the Western press is, quote, Russia has said it would double the price of natural gas for the Ukraine.
It doesn't say that at all.
What Russia said was, we're going to go back to the regular price.
We're going to stop selling at half price.
Yeah, right.
These people, these are the same people who call every tax cut a subsidy.
We know how they are.
But now, so let me ask you about this.
Come on, you're a former CIA analyst, and I know as well as you do, and I agree with you that clearly America picked this fight and pushed it way too far and all this stuff, but what about Putin's ambition?
Wouldn't he like to take back little Russia?
He called Eastern Ukraine little Russia the other day, and people freaked out.
You know, this guy is a mean old right-wing Russian Republican, ain't he?
Wouldn't he take advantage if he could?
Ray, what's up?
Well, I think he takes advantage of the situation simply by sitting back, realizing that he has the high cards, writing to 28 nations that depend on Russian gas and oil and saying, look, you know, we can sell this at market prices now.
The Ukrainian can siphon this thing off.
Don't you guys realize that I have the high cards here?
He doesn't need to, and he said this explicitly.
He doesn't need to do any more.
Russia has enough influence on Ukraine now.
It's a miracle that Nuland and the rest of them went after the government the way they did.
It's not such a miracle because their underlying effort there was to cause as much enmity between Putin and Obama as they possibly could, and they succeeded in that.
They overreached in Ukraine, but at least it's going to be several months now before Putin and Obama can overtly start to create detente again.
So what I'm saying here is that, in my view, Putin doesn't need to do it.
He doesn't.
Why would he want to take on Ukraine when the West has just pledged $28 billion to bail him out?
He's got the high cards.
He has 40,000 troops on the border.
Well, that's his right to have 40,000 troops on the border.
He's not going to invade that part of Ukraine.
So what I see is Western propaganda mills making this case, but it's a lame excuse for their overreach, and all I see is that Putin says, well, you know, we're going to end up with as much influence in Ukraine as we need, just as we had before.
And meanwhile, you know, sort of by accident, we've been given John Kerry and his neocons a really bloody nose.
The president looks really feckless, too.
You know, somebody tells him to threaten consequences, consequences, consequences.
Well, who's going to visualize a situation where the president of the United States needs to really and truly threaten consequences, okay, on a national security matter?
Who's going to take him seriously?
No, I'd rather have a completely lame duck.
I'd rather have Bush at 30% approval or Obama at wherever he's at now, where everybody, the consensus is that he's pathetic and nobody needs to listen to him here or there.
That's my favorite kind of president.
Well, you know, except for, Especially Obama.
He backs down all the time, and nine times out of ten, I agree with him backing down from whatever stupid thing he was going to do.
That's a heck of a thing to say.
What I would say is that to the degree that he has this relationship with Putin and to the degree that can tamp down things in Syria and help things with respect to Iran, then that relationship is worth keeping.
I frankly am surprised at how much backbone and I never thought I'd use backbone in the same sentence with Obama, but he has shown backbone on Iran, and he needs the Russians to continue to help him on that.
Finally, I think we're going to be able to say to the Iranians, Look, we want you to stop working on that nuclear weapon that we know that you stopped working on 11 years ago, and the Iranians are going to say, Okay.
And as I see from the latest reports, they've already agreed to degrade some of their 20% enriched uranium back down to the 3.5% that they need to power their electrical generating reactors.
So I see progress there, and I can see incentive on the part of Israel and some others to derail that progress.
And as long as Obama can have some modicum of relationship of trust with Putin, I think he can face it down and get rid of this needless irritant and start working on other things in the Middle East.
Yeah.
Well, I'll tell you, man, if this Ukraine thing ruins the Iran nuclear deal, I'm going to be angry, and especially considering, like you're saying, and I guess this was your colleague Robert Perry's theory, for the whole problem in the first place was that the neoconservatives, Robert Kagan and his wife, Victoria Nuland, that they seemingly had cooked this thing up just to drive a wedge between America and Russia before the final Iran nuclear deal is signed and implemented, and to see if they can, because that's, of course, their, you know, number one concern is the Likud Party's foreign policy for Israel.
Yeah.
And, you know, as I watch some of the crazier things that are happening, you know, one wonders about the sanity of Kerry.
I notice that TOW weapons, which are anti-tank weapons of considerable power, that they've been made available to the Syrian rebels now, and that's just so mischievous.
You know, those are American-made weapons.
There are all kinds of laws that prevent them from being transferred to people like the rebels, some of whom are al-Qaeda, and the fact that they're going into Syria now tells me only this, that is, that Bashar al-Assad has begun to wipe Syria free of most of the rebels, and there is incentive on the part, first of all, of Israel to keep that terrible situation going in new Syria, where Shiites and Sunnis are at each other's throats.
One senior Israeli official, when asked what Israel's preferred outcome is in Syria, he said, without blinking an eye, well, our preferred outcome is no outcome.
And the follow-up question was, what do you mean, no outcome?
And he said precisely that.
As long as the Shiites and Sunnis are fighting each other, not only in Syria, mind you, but in the rest of the whole area, that part of the Middle East, they're not going to be trading their guns on us, and so they'll kill each other off.
Now, that's one heck of an attitude, but I'm convinced that they spoke with unusual candor, and as long as they can keep the pot boiling in Syria, and these TOW weapons are going to help achieve that, then this unconscionable carnage that has happened for the last three years will continue.
And all the more reason why we need sane, adult people, like Putin certainly is, and like, I believe, Obama can be in his better moments, to make sure that that doesn't get still worse.
Yeah.
Well, I know, too, that's the problem, is it's so little reported, what's really going on, compared even to the embedded kooks from the Iraq War, putting out the government line, there was still some context you could glean from all that stuff, but the news coming out of Syria really doesn't come out in near as much quantity to really get the picture across, but it's a real nightmare over there, and if the Americans, if they meant at all what they ever say about how much they care about peace and freedom and justice and all this crap, at all, their first priority would be resolving this thing, not helping one side win or the other, but calling some kind of truce, figuring out how to do it.
At the very least, tell the Saudis to stop giving them the tow missiles that we gave them.
I mean, come on.
Yeah.
Whether it's the Saudis or the Turks, that's what makes Syria so complicated.
You've got the Saudis, you know, our, quote, best friends, end quote.
You've got the Turks.
You've got the Israelis.
You've got everybody kind of enmeshed in this thing, taking advantage of what three years ago started as a popular uprising of the nature of the Arab Spring.
Now, once they so cynically took hold there, once Prince Bandar decided to send the worst guys into Syria to exploit this thing, then, you know, our incentive was kind of complicated because we don't want to cross Prince Bandar, you know, and we don't want to cross the Turks.
What we should have said and what we would have said if we had a State Department that was worth its name was, look, this is a humanitarian crisis.
What we need to do is cooperate with everyone, including the Russians, to tamp this thing down.
And instead, because largely the Israelis wanted to keep the pot boiling, the pot has been overflowing for the last three years, and that is really a tragedy for the Syrian people.
All right, we'll leave it there.
Thanks so much for your time, Ray.
I sure appreciate it.
You're welcome.
Take care now.
All right, everybody, that is the great Ray McGovern, raymcgovern.com, also consortiumnews.com, a former CIA analyst for 27 years and, of course, co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
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